Development of New Coating Materials Could Protect Equipment in Space

NASA Early Career Faculty Award to Support Development of New Materials for Thermal Insulation

Equipment, satellites, and spacecraft face severe conditions in space that present significant challenges. Electronic systems must be protected from extreme heat and cold, while storage containers holding liquid propellant must be shielded from solar radiation. With support from the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, Shankar Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, aims to develop new materials capable of protecting objects from extreme radiation and temperature fluctuations in space. This represents a crucial step toward enabling long-distance space exploration.

Narayanan stated, "The overall goal is to understand how different geometries and materials, coatings, affect optical and thermal properties. Without understanding this, there is no way to design something that works." Narayanan and his team will explore how different polymers and metals can be combined to provide this type of protection. They will work on different nanomaterials to understand how underlying geometry and structure affect the material's reflective behavior.

Narayanan said, "These basic building blocks—nano-scale beads, cylinders and fibers—can be arranged and stacked into layered structures, and you can obtain really interesting reflective behaviors that differ significantly from the constituent materials." Computational studies conducted by Narayanan's laboratory demonstrate that when manufactured with different geometries, some materials may be more reflective than coatings currently used for insulation in space. With optimal selection of materials and geometries, the team believes coatings can be mechanically robust, optically reflective, thermally insulating, and electrically conductive. Through this research, Narayanan and his team will produce new multilayer coatings with different geometries to test their performance for space applications. This research may also have beneficial applications on Earth. Narayanan noted that because such a coating would be porous, it could be useful as a filtration mechanism for oil-water separation, desalination, food processing, biomedical applications, and energy storage. Because the coatings would have unique optical properties, they could also be used as coatings to reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling in buildings.